
































































































































































































COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 












THE CHURCH, THE BIBLE, 
AND THE CREED 


THOMAS F. GAILOR 

BISHOP OF TENNESSEE 



MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
MILWAUKEE 

A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. 
LONDON 




-£>7 

% 


COPYRIGHT BY 

MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
1924 


©C1A800156 

JUL17 ’24 




I 


TO 

ELLEN DOUGLAS CUNNINGHAM GAILOR 
IN GRATEFUL COMMEMORATION 
OF OUR THIRTY-NINTH ANNIVERSARY 





FOREWORD 


These lectures were delivered as a regular Lenten 
course in Trinity Chapel, New York City, and are 
intended to give a simple historical outline of the 
Church’s fundamental faith. They are published at 
the request of many of the clergy and laity, who 
heard them: and I venture to append a list of books, 
which some may wish to read for wider and com¬ 
pleter study of the subjects I have treated. 

Thos. F. Gailor. 


LIST OF BOOKS 


The Approach to the New Testament, James Moffatt, D.D. 
The Reign of Relativity, Viscount Haldane. 

The Gospel History and its Transmission, F. Crawford 
Burkitt, D.D. 

Problems of Modern Science, 1923, edited by Arthur Dendy, 
D.Sc., F. R. S. 

The Canon of the New Testament, B. F. Westcott, D.D., 
D.C.L. 

Belief in God, Bishop Charles Gore. 

Belief in Christ, Bishop Charles Gore. 

The Holy Spirit and the Church, Bishop Charles Gore. 
Essays on Supernatural Religion, Bishop Lightfoot. 
Irenaeus of Lugdunum, F. R. M. Hitchcock, D.D. 

Authority in the Church, T. B. Strong, D.D. 

Immanence, J. R. Illingworth, D.D. 

Freedom of the Mind in History, Henry Osborne Taylor. 
Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion, Dean W. R. 
Inge. 

Ecumenical Councils, W. P. DuBose, S.T.D. 

Religion Since the Reformation, Leighton Pullan, D.D. 
From Augustus to Augustine, Ernest G. Sihleb, Ph.D. 


LECTURE I 
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 

HE first subject we must consider in 



1 any discussion of Christianity is not 
what we or other writers think of it, but 
what does the Christian Religion claim to 
be, and how do we know anything about its 
origin and its claims? 

Therefore, it is of prime importance that 
we should remember that the religion of 
Christ is not a system of philosophy or mo¬ 
rals, which has been interpreted and ex¬ 
pounded from time to time by individual 
writers who have believed it or have been in¬ 
terested in it; but it is an institution—an or¬ 
ganized society—having its own records, its 
own creeds and rites and usages. It is like 
the government of the United States. You 
may study its documents—the history of its 
growth, the manner and method of its ad¬ 
ministration; but first of all you must recog- 


2 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


nize the existence of the government as a 
living, operating fact, and your interpreta¬ 
tion of the documents and history will be 
affected inevitably by what you know about 
the government. 


So our first step in the effort to understand 
Christianity is to realize that it began as an 
organized institution, a society distinct from 
other societies in the world. 

Professor Burkitt, of Cambridge, Eng¬ 
land, one of the latest and ablest critics of 
the New Testament, says in his recent lec¬ 
tures, “The history of Our Lord’s ministry 
is the history of the birth of the Christian 
Church.” “This Society was formed by Jesus 
Christ Himself.” He proceeds to show, from 
St. Mark’s Gospel, that after the incident of 
the healing of the man with the withered 
hand on the Sabbath Day, Our Lord broke 
off relations with official Judaism and 
founded His own Society. As Prof. Burkitt 
says, “After St. Mark III, 6, a new era in the 
ministry is opened. From that moment be- 



THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


3 


gins the separate existence of the embryo 
Church.” 

The existence of the Church is taken for 
granted in the other writings of the New 
Testament. We read in St. Luke’s Gospel 
(VI, 13) that Our Lord selected twelve of 
His disciples and named them Apostles. 
Here begins the formal organization. St. 
Matthew tells us that Our Lord declared 
that the gates of hell should not prevail 
against His Church (XVI, 18), and the par¬ 
ables of the Kingdom, while we cannot press 
their details, all imply the conception of an 
ordered society, with differentiation of func¬ 
tion. We are told by St. Luke in the Acts of 
the Apostles that Our Lord remained on 
earth forty days after the Resurrection, 
speaking of the things pertaining to the 
Kingdom, and it is probable that what they 
did afterwards in perfecting the organiza¬ 
tion of the Church was in obedience to His 
commands. Anyhow the history in the Acts 
and the Epistles of St. Paul shows the exis¬ 
tence of an organized society. The appoint¬ 
ment of Matthias in the place of Judas, the 


4 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


appointment of the seven deacons, the con¬ 
firmation of the people of Samaria after 
Philip had baptized them, the sending forth 
of Paul and Barnabas on their first mission¬ 
ary journey, and the ordination of elders in 
every Church—all these incidents take for 
granted without any argument the fact that 
the Christian Religion was an organized So¬ 
ciety or Church and nothing else, quite dis¬ 
tinct from Judaism or any Gentile organiza¬ 
tion. 

Since that time, it is sufficient to say, there 
can be no doubt in the mind of any man who 
reads the records. Christianity has come 
down through all the centuries as an organ¬ 
ized society. The early Apologists in their 
defense of the religion emphasize this fact, 
and it is of vital importance to us in our esti¬ 
mate of our religion today. 

We may ask, then, what was the function, 
the significance, of the Church, according to 
the documents which it has brought down to 
us and upon which it bases its claims? 

(1) The Church claims to be a spiritual 
society—human in its administration in- 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


5 


deed, but guarded by divine sanctions. It is 
not a mere voluntary society—a club or as¬ 
sociation. It represents a definite act or 
commission from God, and it was endued 
with the Holy Spirit. It took its origin from 
and is a continuation of the Jewish Church. 
For the religion of the Jews assumed as its 
fundamental conception, the sovereignty of 
God. 

Christ Himself maintained in the strong¬ 
est way that He was sent by God. He came 
forth out of God; so that rejection of Him 
was rejection of the Father. The mission of 
Christ and the founding of the Church was 
a new act of God, continuous organically 
with what had gone before in the experience 
of the Jewish race, and therefore quite in¬ 
telligible to the Jews and to those familiar 
with their history. So St. Paul says that 
Christ is the first-born of all creation; in 
Him were created all things in the heavens 
and on the earth. All things have been cre¬ 
ated through Him and unto Him. He is be¬ 
fore all things and in Him all things consist, 
and He is the Head of the Body, the Church 


6 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


(Col. I, 15, 18). So the Epistles to the Ephe¬ 
sians and the Hebrews. 

In other words, the Church is a divine So¬ 
ciety, instituted by God, to reveal and carry 
on His purpose for the whole world, because 
it is the instrument, the body, of the Eternal 
Son, through Whom the reconciliation with 
God may be achieved by the indwelling 
power of God the Holy Spirit. Indeed, St. 
Paul says that to be baptized into the Church 
is to be baptized into Christ (I Cor. XII, 13; 
Gal. Ill, 27). Such is the august, the lofty, 
sublime conception of the Church, as de¬ 
scribed by the writers of the New Testa¬ 
ment. 

(2) We must ask then, how did the Apos¬ 
tles, men with their human limitations, but 
believing in the grace and power given them 
by the Holy Spirit, try to put these ideas in 
practice in the world of every-day life? 

Our attention is called at the beginning of 
the Acts of the Apostles to the manifesta¬ 
tions of new power resulting from the de¬ 
scent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, not 
upon individuals but upon the corporate 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


7 


Church: and St. Peter’s sermon, after re¬ 
citing the fact of the Resurrection of Christ, 
called upon the people to repent and be bap¬ 
tized. Thereupon, the record runs, about 
three thousand souls were added to them by 
baptism, and “They continued stedfastly” 
in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in 
the breaking of bread, and in the prayers. 
Perhaps the most beautiful and striking il¬ 
lustration of the practical, every-day Church 
life of the early Christians is furnished by 
St. Luke’s incidental account of the condi¬ 
tions of the Church at Ephesus. 

We are told in the nineteenth chapter of 
the Acts, that St. Paul administered Chris¬ 
tian Baptism to the disciples at Ephesus and 
laid his hands on them, that they might re¬ 
ceive the Holy Ghost. He also remained 
there teaching for more than two years, and 
probably, before he left, organized the 
Church and ordained elders, as was his 
custom in other places ( cf . Acts XIV, 23). 
St. Luke does not describe the duties 
or functions of these elders. There was no 
need to do so. The Church people for whom 


8 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


he was writing were familiar with the work 
assigned to these officers. 

Now it happened that St. Paul, quite a 
long time afterwards when on his way to 
Jerusalem, decided to stop at Miletus, the 
seaport of Ephesus, and give some direc¬ 
tions about the Church in that place. So he 
sent for the Elders of the Church at Ephesus 
and they came to Miletus, and St. Paul’s ad¬ 
dress to them is one of the most beautiful 
and touching things in the book. He refers 
to their position as overseers or Bishops, and 
to their authority, which had been given 
them by the Holy Spirit, and he exhorts 
them to take heed to themselves and to the 
flock; to shepherd the Church of God, which 
He purchased with His own blood. He 
warns them against false teaching, remind¬ 
ing them how he himself had taught them 
for three whole years. 

It is not unreasonable to suppose that his 
use of the word “flock” may be a memory of 
Our Lord’s reported saying in St. Luke, 
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s 
good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


9 


Undoubtedly this Church as Ephesus had a 
special place in the affection of St. Paul. 
He wrote a great letter to "the faithful in 
Christ Jesus who are at Ephesus,” and to¬ 
wards the close of his life, he wrote two let¬ 
ters to Timothy, who had been placed in 
charge of that Church. And in all these let¬ 
ters there is a maturity and fulness of doc¬ 
trinal statement to be expected in letters ad¬ 
dressed to well-instructed Christians. 

(3) There are two more characteristics of 
the Church as referred to in the New Testa¬ 
ment, which deserve notice. 

First of all, it was a witness to a fact. Mat¬ 
thias was elected as an Apostle in order that 
he might bear witness to the Resurrection. 
Indeed, this is a charge laid upon the Apos¬ 
tles by Our Lord Himself (Acts I, 8). 

The importance of this is that the Chris¬ 
tian Society—the Church—claimed at the 
very first to be entrusted with the evidence 
for a fact which transcends ordinary human 
experience, and which, having occurred at a 
definite point in time, is a matter to be borne 
witness to by historical testimony. But this 


10 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


testimony is borne not by isolated individ¬ 
uals, but by the whole corporate Society. 
Indeed the Society exists as a witness to the 
fact without which the Society would 
never have continued to be. Therefore the 
entire worship and teaching of the Society 
is based on this fact, its sacramental life, and 
its formal creed. 

Once more, the Church from the first has 
the charge to be Catholic. The witness is to 
be borne not only in Judea and Jerusalem, 
but unto the ends of the earth. To quote 
Dr. Strong’s book on “Authority in the 
Church,” “It was only by degrees that the 
Apostles learned the meaning of this. But 
when they had once realized the unity of the 
Church, they seemed to have felt the need of 
something like uniformity in practice. Paul 
and Silas, after the Council of Jerusalem, 
went the round of the Churches which St. 
Paul had visited on his first journey, and 
delivered to them to keep the decrees which 
had been determined by the Apostles and 
Elders in Jerusalem (Acts XVI, 4).” 

That Christianity began its work in the 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


11 


world as an organized Church or fellowship 
is one of the plainest truths in history, if we 
accept its documents. As St. Luke says in 
the introduction to his Gospel, “It seemed 
good to me also, having had perfect under¬ 
standing of all things from the very first, to 
write unto thee in order, most excellent 
Theophilus, that thou mightest know the 
certainty of those things, wherein thou hast 
been instructed.” The Church had already 
instructed him before the Gospel was writ¬ 
ten. But more than that, the Church, so far 
from being an accidental and negligible fac¬ 
tor in the scheme of Christianity, is a vital 
and indispensable part of it. As Coleridge 
said long ago in his “Aids to Reflection,” 
“Christianity without a Church is vanity 
and delusion.” 

This thought is common in the earliest 
Christian writings in the sub-Apostolic age. 
Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, who was a con¬ 
temporary of St. Paul himself, and was de¬ 
livered to the wild beasts in Rome about the 
year 110, has left us seven letters in which he 
takes for granted the Catholic Church, name 


12 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


and thing, and refers to its organization as 
a commonplace of Christian knowledge. 
And Irenaeus, who was a child at the time 
of the martyrdom of Ignatius, and became 
in the next generation the Bishop of Lyons, 
in Gaul, has left us this statement as to the 
accepted principles of the Christian Re¬ 
ligion, viz: “It is the doctrine of the Apos¬ 
tles and the ancient system of the Church in 
all the world; and the character of the Body 
of Christ according to the successions of the 
Bishops to whom they (the Apostles) deliv¬ 
ered the Church in each separate place; the 
complete use moreover of the Scripture 
which has come down to our time, preserved 
without corruption, receiving neither addi¬ 
tion nor loss; its public reading without 
falsification; legitimate and careful exposi¬ 
tion according to the Scriptures without 
peril and without blasphemy; and the pre¬ 
eminent gift of love” (IV, 33, 8). As Bishop 
Lightfoot says, we can learn more about 
early Christianity from Irenaeus than from 
all the German monographs that have ap¬ 
peared in the last fifty years. 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


13 


One more quotation I must make, from 
the great Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. 
Temple, who was in no sense or degree a 
partisan or narrow-minded. He said in his 
sermon at the consecration of Truro Cathe¬ 
dral, 1888: “We are sometimes asked to 
think that the Church only exists in the 
union of believers and has no reality of its 
own. Now it is perfectly clear that in the 
New Testament the idea of the Church is 
not that. Men talk sometimes as if a Church 
could be constituted simply by Christians 
coming together and uniting themselves 
into one body for the purpose. Men speak as 
if Christians came first and the Church af¬ 
ter; as if the origin of the Church was in the 
wills of individual Christians who compose 
it. But, on the contrary, throughout the 
teaching of the Apostles we see that it is the 
Church that comes first and the members of 
it afterwards. And the purpose of the suc¬ 
cession of the Ministry is to make men feel 
the unity of the Body as it comes down the 
stream of history, and, if possible, to touch 
their hearts with some sense of that power 


14 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


which the Lord bequeathed when He 
ascended up on high and gave gifts to men; 
with some sense of that undying life, which 
shall still, until He comes again, unite those 
who love Him with Himself, and spread the 
knowledge of His name throughout the 
human race.” The Church takes its origin 
not in the will of man but in the will of the 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

I have felt obliged in this lecture to go 
over much familiar ground and insist upon 
the existence of the Church, as an organized 
Catholic institution, as an absolutely essen¬ 
tial part of the Christian scheme; for it has 
been truly said that everybody is a true 
Churchman in the very same proportion as 
he is a true Christian. This is made neces¬ 
sary today, because some German Prot¬ 
estant scholars have seen fit to assert posi¬ 
tively that it is inconceivable that any such 
conception of a universal Church could have 
existed in the minds of the first Christians; 
that the idea at best must have originated 
with St. Paul; that therefore we are at lib¬ 
erty to speculate and guess how such an idea 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


15 


arose, how it came to capture and control 
the mind of a man like Irenaeus, for ex¬ 
ample, whose life reached back almost to the 
Apostolic age, in order to discredit it. The 
argument from silence has been pushed to 
the limit. If any piece of writing happens to 
be found in which the idea is not definitely 
expressed, immediately we are told, “he 
knew nothing about it,” “never heard of it.” 
Just as we are told, from time to time, “Paul 
never knew this,” “never heard of that,” be¬ 
cause he does not happen to mention it in 
those of his writings which have come down 
to us. 

And yet the Church was there. As Prof. 
Adolph Harnack admits, “The history of the 
Gospel contains two great transitions, viz: 
from Christ to the Brotherhood of believers 
in Christ, and from this to the incipient 
Catholic Church; and both of which fall 
within the First Century” (“Hist, of 
Dogma,” I, 71). 

Yes; the Church was there, however it 
may be accounted for. It was there in the 
time of Irenaeus, 170 A.D., and in the time 


16 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


of Ignatius, 110 A.D., and as far back as the 
time when Paul and Silas went the round of 
the Christian communities announcing the 
decrees set forth by the Central Council at 
Jerusalem for them to obey. 

Christianity started as a fellowship. Our 
Lord called two men to be His disciples (St. 
Mark I, 16) to begin with and not one at a 
time; and Christianity has been primarily a 
fellowship, a society, a Church, ever since. 
And that Church idea, that corporate con¬ 
ception of Christianity, needs to be empha¬ 
sized today. As the Dean of St. Paul’s says 
in that beautiful devotional book that has 
just been published: 

“We do need another co-operative society to 
combat the society of co-operative guilt which the 
New Testament calls the world. We must help each 
other to make the right life possible in society. 
This is the true office of the Church, the bonds of 
which Christ meant to be mutual love and willing 
service .... and in the difficult times which are 
coming, Christians must above all things be true to 
their Master’s teaching and methods. The results 
are not likely to be outwardly very striking: but 
an earnest and steady witness to the Gospel of 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


17 


Christ, even on the part of a few persons, will be of 
immense value. For the world, even in the bad 
sense, is not wholly bad. It has a conscience, and it 
is not satisfied with itself. The hidden man of the 
heart in each man longs to play traitor to the prince 
of this world, and takes courage when he sees that 
he is not alone/’* 

We hear much talk today about Chris¬ 
tianity without the Church, and a prominent 
editor says: “We want the religion of Jesus 
as a substitute for Christianity.” But what 
is the religion of Jesus except as the Church 
has selected and presented the records and 
handed them down to us? If the teaching of 
any section of the Church is clearly incon¬ 
sistent with the records, then that teaching 
should be rejected. But after all, the rec¬ 
ords, i. e., the Scriptures, are the Church's 
own chosen standards of appeal. We are not 
to be surprised if the practice of the Church 
includes some things not explicitly men¬ 
tioned in the records—though not incon¬ 
sistent with them. The existing government 
of the United States takes for granted many 


“‘Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion,” p. 86. 



18 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


things not referred to in the literature of the 
fathers. 

It is easy to understand how important 
this is: for it is obviously impossible to be 
fair to the claims of Christianity without 
taking into account the fact that the docu¬ 
ments, that is, the New Testament Scrip¬ 
tures, are only the fragmentary and partial 
records of a living, corporate Society; rec¬ 
ords which the Society has selected and pre¬ 
served and handed down for its own use as 
a standard and criterion by which its teach¬ 
ing is to be judged and tried. The recogni¬ 
tion of this relation of the Church to the 
New Testament is bound to change the 
whole attitude of our minds when we come 
to study the history, and without it we can¬ 
not do justice to the doctrine and practice 
of the religion. 

As Bishop Westcott said (“Introduc. to 
the Canon of the N. T.”): 

“Our errors and misunderstandings as to the 
earliest ages of Christendom spring, I believe, most 
commonly from neglecting the life which underlies 
the fragmentary records. The testimonies which 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


19 


can be gathered from the meager remains of a lim¬ 
ited literature are the signs of the life of the Church 
and not the measure of it. It is true of the first cen¬ 
turies, as it is true of the present century, that we 
cannot understand the history of Christianity un¬ 
less we recognize the action of the Holy Spirit 
through the Christian Society. It is through the ac¬ 
tive belief that He speaks and acts still as He spoke 
and acted then, not as we should expect before¬ 
hand, that we can yet ‘win our souls in patience/ ” 

We believe, then, in the Holy Catholic 
Church, which was founded by the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and has had a continuous his¬ 
tory from that day to this. Human arro¬ 
gance and impatience have interrupted and 
broken its visible unity. Human ambition 
and worldliness have checked and retarded 
its Catholic conquest of the world by divert¬ 
ing the minds of its leaders to sectional and 
individual aggrandizement and power. It 
has indeed been human in its administra¬ 
tion, and, as the Apostle said, “We have this 
treasure in earthen vessels/' 

Nevertheless, the Church has been God's 
agent for bearing witness, from generation 
to generation, to the Christian Revelation, 


20 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


and has preserved for us the Holy Scrip¬ 
tures and the ancient Creed and Sacraments. 
It has been itself a challenge throughout the 
Christian centuries against war, against sel¬ 
fishness, against individualism, on behalf of 
the brotherhood of mankind. It has survived 
the attacks of enemies and the treason of 
false friends. It has lived through many per¬ 
secutions and many political and social revo¬ 
lutions. As old Hugh Latimer said, “It is an 
anvil that hath worn out many a hammer.” 
The variety and richness of its literature, 
and the long, unbroken line of its saints and 
confessors, bear witness to the Presence and 
Power of the Holy Spirit of God. Yes, in 
spite of the weakness and imperfections of 
us, who represent it, the Church is still di¬ 
vine in its authorization, divine in its essen¬ 
tial spirit of service to the world—the haven 
of safety, the pillar of faith, the home of 
peace, for the poorest and weakest, as for 
the best and noblest, of mankind. 


LECTURE II 
THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 
HE Christian Church claimed to be the 



1 continuation of the Jewish Church, 
and that Jesus is the Christ, the promised 
Messiah of God. 

Therefore naturally the Old Testament 
Scriptures, commonly known through the 
Greek translation, the Septuagint, was the 
Bible of the Church—although the Jewish 
teachers did not agree upon an exact list of 
Old Testament books until the Synod of 
Jamnia, 90 A.D.—and the Christians inter¬ 
preted these Hebrew Scriptures in the light 
of the Christian Gospel, which was at once 
the fulfilment and the vindication of the Old 
Testament. 

Our Lord Himself referred frequently to 
the Scriptures of the Old Testament, say¬ 
ing, “This day is the Scripture fulfilled.” Af¬ 
ter His Resurrection, on the road to Em- 


22 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


maus, He expounded the Scriptures to the 
two disciples, showing them the meaning of 
the prophecies concerning Himself. So St. 
Paul and the other Apostles refer to the 
Scriptures to justify their belief in Christ 
and His Resurrection as part of the divine 
plan of Redemption. As St. John says, “The 
disciples believed the Scriptures and the 
word which Jesus had said.” 

So Apollos was “mighty in the Scrip¬ 
tures,” and St. Paul reminds Timothy, 
“From a child thou hast known the Holy 
Scriptures which are able to make thee wise 
unto salvation”; and he says that all Scrip¬ 
ture inspired of God is profitable for teach¬ 
ing, for reproof, for correction, for instruc¬ 
tion in righteousness, and out of them he 
proved that Jesus is the Christ. 


This was the basis of the appeal that was 
made to the Jews, as we see illustrated espe¬ 
cially in St. Paul’s mission to the town of 
Berea in Macedonia. The local Jews, we are 
told, “were more noble (or unprejudiced) 
than those of Thessalonica, in that they re- 



THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


23 


ceived the Word (as preached by Paul) with 
all readiness of mind, examining the Scrip¬ 
tures daily, whether these things were so. 
Many of them therefore believed” (Acts 
XVII, 11). 

So St. Peter, in his second Epistle (I, 17), 
speaks of his personal knowledge and sight 
of the Transfiguration of the Lord, and says 
that that experience made the Old Testa¬ 
ment prophecies more sure to him; and he 
goes on to remind his readers that no 
prophecy of Scripture is of private interpre¬ 
tation. 

Now, as Dr. Moffat says in his “Approach 
to the New Testament,” the Christian Church 
claimed to possess the same Spirit as had in¬ 
spired the Old Testament, and therefore 
very early, even in the writings of the New 
Testament themselves, there are indications 
that the Christian teachers are giving the 
same reverence to Apostolic writings as 
they were giving to the Old Bible. For ex¬ 
ample, St. Paul, in his first letter to the 
Corinthians, quotes as Scripture a saying of 
Our Lord which we find recorded in St. 


24 CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 

Luke’s Gospel, viz: “The laborer is worthy 
of his hire.” St. Paul not only quotes it as 
Scripture, but couples it with a passage from 
Deuteronomy, as if to show that it was 
Scripture in the same sense that the Old 
Testament was. So St. Peter speaks of the 
Epistles of St. Paul as in a true sense Scrip¬ 
tural documents, “which the ignorant and 
unsteadfast wrest, as they do also the other 
Scriptures, to their own destruction.” 

However, it was only by slow degrees 
that the Church selected the writings which 
were to be finally collected and authorized 
as the “New Testament,” or rather the 
“New Covenant” with God, which was em¬ 
bodied once and for all in Jesus Christ. 

The Church was alive and growing, and 
the intellect and conscience of the Christian 
communities were testing out the various 
documents, the letters, and sayings, which 
were being read for edification in the ser¬ 
vices of public worship. Some of these docu¬ 
ments, like the Epistle of Clement and the 
Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of 


THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


25 


Hernias, were finally discarded, but the 
process of discrimination and rejection was 
gradual and careful. Meanwhile, as Dr. 
Moffat says (p. 106), “The Church drew up 
a Creed, that is, a brief statement of Chris¬ 
tian truth, which stated lucidly and regu¬ 
larly the meaning of the religion which was 
embodied in the sacred writings to guide the 
people in understanding what the New Tes¬ 
tament really means, and (2) she put the 
teaching more and more under the super¬ 
vision of the Bishops, as the representatives 
of Apostolic Orthodoxy, when schools of 
Christian teachers and thinkers became dan¬ 
gerous, and (3) encouraged the allegorical 
method of interpretation, in order to avoid 
some of the awkward difficulties raised by 
the literal text.” 

The gradual growth of formal and official 
recognition of the books which we now call 
the Bible is most interesting. 

We have no complete and authorized list 
of the books earlier than the Fourth Cen¬ 
tury, but the casual references and quota¬ 
tions from the writings of the New Testa- 


26 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


ment prove that the books were in common 
use. 

These accidental references are found in 
the earliest Christian writers, beginning 
with Clement of Rome, whose extant letter 
to the Corinthians may be dated about the 
year 80. As Westcott says, “There is no 
reason to question the belief that Clement 
was an immediate disciple of the Christian 
Apostles and overseer of the Church of 
Rome. He died about the year 100. The 
powerful and lasting influence that he exer¬ 
cised is witnessed by the extensive literature 
that grew up bearing his name. The only 
universally accredited writing of his, how¬ 
ever, is this first Epistle to the Corinthians, 
in the Greek language, that being the lan¬ 
guage of educated men in Rome at that 
period.” The relation of this Epistle to our 
canonical books, as Westcott says, “is full of 
interest. In its style, in its doctrine, and in 
its theory of Church government, it con¬ 
firms the genuineness of the disputed books 
of the New Testament.” It is saturated in 
thought and language with the teaching of 


THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


27 


St. Paul and St. Peter, and it shows a fa¬ 
miliarity with the great outlines of Our 
Lord’s life as given in the Gospels. 

This Epistle was read in the service of the 
Church for many years, and was regarded 
with a reverence second only to that given 
to the writings of an Apostle. 

Almost contemporaneous with Clement’s 
letter are the seven Letters of Ignatius and 
the Letter of Polycarp, and following them 
almost immediately are the rather volumi¬ 
nous writings of Irenaeus, who was a pupil 
of Polycarp, and the writings of the lawyer, 
Tertullian, all coming within the Second 
Century. In addition to these, we have the 
fragmentary remains of Papias, Bishop of 
Hierapolis, a friend of Polycarp, the two 
Apologies of Justin Martyr, the Apology of 
Aristides, and many other fragmentary 
writings. 

In some respects the most important of 
these remains for our purpose is a manu¬ 
script known as the Canon of Muratori, or 
the Muratorian Canon, which was discov¬ 
ered by Muratori, Librarian of Milan, in the 


28 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


Ambrosian Library at Milan in 1740. Schol¬ 
ars agree upon its date as about 170 A.D. 
It is a Latin translation of an original Greek 
text, but is torn and mutilated, several pages 
being missing at the beginning and end. The 
extant pages of this manuscript give a gen¬ 
eral list of the writings which are read as 
Scripture in the Church, and all the books 
of the New Testament, as we now have 
them, are mentioned except the First Epistle 
of St. John, the First and Second of St. 
Peter, the Epistle of St. James, and that To 
the Hebrews; but the mutilated condition of 
the manuscript, and the uncertainty as to 
who was the author of it, render definite in¬ 
ference impossible. 


Our conclusion, after a survey of the 
Christian literature during the century, or, 
we may say, during the seventy years im¬ 
mediately succeeding the age of the Apos¬ 
tles, is: 

(1) Of the twenty-seven books compos¬ 
ing the New Testament as we now have it, 



THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


29 


all are referred to in the writings of this 
period, with possibly one exception, viz: 
the Second Epistle of St. Peter is not men¬ 
tioned or quoted explicitly, though there is 
a doubtful reference to it. 

(2) The evidence furnished by these writ¬ 
ings to the books of the New Testament is, 
when we consider it, wonderfully full and 
extensive. Moreover it is given, as has been 
often said, in a way that is most convincing. 
The allusions to Scripture are perfectly nat¬ 
ural. The quotations are prefaced by no 
apology or explanation. The language of 
the Scripture was so familiar as to have be¬ 
come a common dialect, and it is used by men 
of different character, even by those who 
wrote against Christianity, and in widely 
separated localities, with extraordinary con¬ 
sistency and lack of discrepancy. This har¬ 
mony of thought and knowledge means in¬ 
evitably a common rule and common con¬ 
sent. It is not the testimony of individuals, 
but the voice of the living, working, Cath¬ 
olic Church. 


30 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


The end of the Second Century and the 
beginning of the Third Century show the 
Church awakening to a fuller consciousness 
of its universal corporate life. The Christian 
literature is more abundant and more formal. 
A common Christian vocabulary was being 
created. The opposition of outsiders was 
forcing a clearer statement of principles. 
The intellectual expression of the faith was 
becoming more definite and more sure. 

The Third Century opens with two great 
names, both representing the Church in 
Alexandria, the center of the intellectual 
life of the Christian Church at that time. 
They were Clement and Origen. Clement 
was born in 165 and died in 220 A.D. Origen 
was born in 186 and died in 253 A.D. The 
surviving works of these fathers comprise 
several volumes. Clement’s list of the books 
of the New Testament is preserved in Euse¬ 
bius and one statement of his is specially 
interesting, viz: he declares that he had it 
from a sainted old presbyter that St. Paul 
had written the Epistle to the Hebrews in 
the Hebrew language, and that it was trans- 


THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


31 


lated into Greek by St. Luke, and that this 
accounts for the smoothness and eloquence 
of the style and its resemblance to that of 
the Acts. 

But Origen is the great name of this 
period. He was an omniverous student, 
of vast energy and intellectual activity. 
He is the first Biblical critic in history, and 
for about forty years he wrote and taught 
incessantly. Like the fathers who preceded 
him, he professed to repeat only the teaching 
he had received. His comments on the so- 
called disputed books are most valuable. He 
shows himself familiar with all the books of 
the New Testament as we know them, and 
his vast labors in writing out in parallel 
columns the Hebrew and Greek versions of 
the Old Testament are known to all. 

There is one famous passage in Origen’s 
commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel which 
shows the existence of spurious gospels and 
the way they were regarded by the Church. 

Origen says: “The Church has four 
Gospels—Matthew and Mark and Luke and 
John. Heresies have very many, of which 


32 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


one is entitled 'According to the Egyptians/ 
another 'According to the Twelve Apostles/ 
But the four Gospels only are approved, out 
of which we must bring forth points of 
teaching under the person of Our Lord and 
Saviour .... In all this we approve 
nothing else but that which the Church ap¬ 
proves’" (Horn. I, "in Luc.”). 

We need not recite the evidence of later 
writers, as the literature becomes more and 
more extensive. 

When Constantine became sole Emperor 
and, under the influence of his mother and 
his vision of the Cross, decided to favor 
Christianity, he ordered Eusebius, Bishop 
of Caesarea, to prepare fifty copies of the 
divine Scriptures, of which he judged the 
preparation and the use to be most neces¬ 
sary for the purpose of the Church, written 
on prepared skins, by the help of skilful art¬ 
ists, accurately acquainted with their craft. 
"To that end orders were issued to the 
Governor of the Province to furnish what¬ 
ever was required for the work, and author¬ 
ity was given Eusebius to employ two pub- 


THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


33 


lie carriages to convey the books to the Em¬ 
peror.” 

This book, prepared for Constantine, 323 
A.D., may be called the first real Bible, al¬ 
though the name Bible ( Biblia ) to denote 
the collection of books was first used by 
Chrysostom seventy-five years later. 

Up to the time of Constantine various 
opinions had been expressed by individual 
writers as to the canonicity, i.e., the right 
to be included in the Scriptures, of five New 
Testament books, viz: the Epistles of James 
and Jude, Second of St. Peter, Second and 
Third of St. John, and the Apocalypse. St. 
Paul’s authorship of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews was also questioned. But after the 
preparation of this book for Constantine, re¬ 
inforced a few years later by the list of 
Athanasius, the great leader of the Alex¬ 
andrian Church, the difference between con¬ 
troverted and acknowledged Epistles was 
ignored except as a matter of history; and 
the books of the New Testament, as we 
know them, were universally accepted and 
used. The acts of several smaller diocesan 


34 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


and provincial councils contained lists of the 
sacred books; but there is no reliable record 
of any Ecumenical Council having passed 
judgment on them. The Council of Carthage 
especially, presided over by the great Augus¬ 
tine in 397 A.D., may be said to have fixed 
both the Old Testament and the New Testa¬ 
ment in their present form. St. Jerome's 
Latin translation of the Scriptures, the Vul¬ 
gate, in 410 A.D., practically settled the 
Canon for the Western Church. 

The Roman Catholic Church is the only 
historic Church which has undertaken to 
give a fixed and definite list of the books of 
Scripture as indisputable and canonical by 
conciliar decree, with an anathema attached. 
The Council of Trent (1545 A.D.) issued 
the decree listing the New Testament 
books as we have them, but including in the 
list of Old Testament books, Tobit, Judith, 
Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, and 1 and 2 Mac¬ 
cabees. These books were included in the 
Greek (LXX) translation but not in the 
original Hebrew; and they were not recog¬ 
nized by Athanasius and his contempora- 


THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


35 


ries as canonical Scripture. Moreover, the 
Council also put the unwritten traditions 
said to have been received from the Apos¬ 
tles upon the same level of authority as the 
written Scriptures themselves (4th Session). 

The Church of England adopted a more 
liberal, or a more cautious, position, and in 
the Vlth of the Articles of Religion—Ar¬ 
ticles which were set forth in the reign of 
Elizabeth to quiet the minds of those who 
were troubled about the attitude of the Re¬ 
formed Church—declared that “Holy Scrip¬ 
ture containeth all things necessary to salva¬ 
tion; so that whatsoever is not read therein, 
nor may be proved thereby, is not to be re¬ 
quired .... In the name of Holy Scrip¬ 
ture we do understand those canonical books 
of the Old and New Testament, of whose 
authority was never any doubt in the 
Church.” Then follows a list of thirty-nine 
Old Testament books and twenty-seven of 
the New Testament. A list is also given of 
the books from the Greek Septuagint, com¬ 
monly called “Apocrypha,” including those 
declared canonical by the Council of Trent, 


36 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


and they are recommended as “books to be 
read for example of life and instruction of 
manners.” 

These so-called Apocryphal books of the 
Old Testament abound in passages of great 
literary and spiritual beauty and power, and 
there is no good reason why they have been 
omitted from our Bibles. Many of the les¬ 
sons ordered to be read in the Church ser¬ 
vice on Saints’ Days are taken from them. 
They do not rank in importance for doctrinal 
teaching with the great prophetic writings 
of the old Testament, but they certainly 
have an historic place in the volume of Holy 
Scripture. 

Thus it will appear that the Catholic 
Church as a whole has never issued an ecu¬ 
menical decree setting forth a complete, 
authoritative list of the books of Scripture, 
but has preserved for us a collection of 
sacred books of varying character and im¬ 
portance which, to use the phrase of the 
councils, are to be read in the service of the 
Church. The Church has not encouraged us 
to regard this collection—this Bible—as 


THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


37 


a book of magic, and has not taught that all 
the books are of equal authority and value. 
Nor has the Church defined the exact mean¬ 
ing of the words “Sacred” and “Holy” as 
applied to the books and the inspired author¬ 
ity that these words imply. All that the 
Creed says is that “the Holy Ghost spake 
by the Prophets.” 

The Christian fathers spoke of the Old 
Testament as “The Divine Library,” and it 
contains history and poetry and prophecy 
and allegories and parables; but St. Paul 
says that they “are able to make us wise 
unto salvation through faith which is in 
Christ Jesus,” and Our Lord Himself said, 
“They testify of Me.” Dr. Sanday has beauti¬ 
fully described what this testimony is in his 
Bampton Lectures: 

'‘How are we to bring together,” he says, “those 
two parallel lines of prophecy, which exist side by 
side in the Old Testament but nowhere meet, the 
ideal King, the descendant of David, and the ideal 
Prophet, the suffering Servant of Jehovah? What 
have two such different conceptions in common 
with each other? They seem to move in different 


38 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


planes, with nothing even to suggest their coales¬ 
cence. We turn the page which separates the New 
Testament from the Old. We look at the Figure 
which is delineated there, and we find in it a mar¬ 
vellous meeting of traits derived from the most dif¬ 
ferent and distant sources, from Nathan, from 
Amos, from First Isaiah, from Second Isaiah, from 
Zechariah, from Daniel, from the Second Psalm, 
from the Twenty-second, from the Sixty-ninth, 
from the Hundred-and-Tenth. And these traits do 
not meet, as we might expect them to do, in some 
labored and artificial compound, but in the sweet 
and gracious figure of Jesus of Nazareth—King, but 
not as men count kingship; crowned, but with the 
crown of thorns; suffering for our redemption, but 
suffering only that He may reign.” 

So may we find Him if we search for Him. 

As for the New Testament, we may say 
that just as the Church herself is the crea¬ 
tion, the offspring of that momentous and 
unprecedented event in human history, the 
Incarnation of God in Christ; so the Scrip¬ 
tures, which were written by men, whose 
souls were exalted by immediate personal 
experience of the outpouring of the Holy 
Spirit in that unique and wonderful time, 
are the explanation and the corroboration 


THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


39 


of the life and thought and purpose of the 
Catholic Church. 

It has been well said that the Church can¬ 
not be defined like a geometrical figure by 
its limiting line, but is defined by its blazing 
center, from which true paths of light 
stream forth. So Our Lord’s Life and Our 
Lord’s teaching, like the Sun in Heaven, by 
the power of the Holy Spirit, irradiate and 
illumine both the Scriptures and the Church. 
And the Church invites and encourages the 
study of the Scriptures. They are her Scrip¬ 
tures—her own authorized credentials. 
They are the norm and standard of all her 
teaching. They are the Word of God to the 
Church, the record of His redeeming love, 
conveyed, to be sure, as the Epistle to the 
Hebrews says, “in many parts and many 
fashions,” and not free from the imperfec¬ 
tions which the limitations and infirmities 
of the human beings who wrote them na¬ 
turally involve. But certainly they have 
proved themselves to be the Book of books 
in human history—the cradle of liberty, the 
fountain of free institutions, the destroyer of 


40 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


despotisms, the friend of the people. Their 
inspired precepts have glorified the world’s 
noblest literature and have enlightened the 
minds and comforted the hearts of the high¬ 
est and humblest of mankind with the under¬ 
standing of the secret of the Spiritual and 
Eternal life. 

If men of reverent and humble and en¬ 
quiring minds wish to investigate the 
sources and try to explain the ways and 
methods by which this or that part of the 
Bible came to be written, who can object? 
And so it has become the fashion with some 
scholars, for the past sixty years, to concen¬ 
trate all their ingenuity and learning upon 
the critical study of these Scriptures, and 
especially of the Old Testament, and doubt¬ 
less many interesting and perhaps helpful 
results have been obtained. But too often 
imagination has run away with reason, and 
speculation has replaced sound judgment. 
Pride of intellect has built fantastic theories, 
and arguments begun in unbelief have ended 
in unbelief; and unbelief is practical Athe¬ 
ism, and Atheism is despair. 


THE HOLY SCRIPTURES 


41 


But the Church lives, and the Bible grips 
the souls of men, not by the operation of one 
organ, the mind, but by faith of the whole 
personality in Jesus Christ. For the faith in 
Jesus is not merely intellectual; it is an act 
of the whole man, and the intellect plays 
only its proper and subordinate part. “The 
reasons for this Faith are incommunicable: 
they rest on personal relations deeper than 
intellect, deeper than words; but as time 
goes on, experience makes the faith and trust 
still stronger.” It is ever the way when we 
love a person and know in our hearts that 
the love is returned. “Spiritual things are 
spiritually discerned,” and “We walk by 
faith and not by sight.” 


LECTURE III 

THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


T HE Bishop of Manchester, Dr. Temple, 
in his lectures to the Student Move¬ 
ment Conference, makes an admirable state¬ 
ment of the philosophical conditions under 
which we must conceive of a spiritual Reve¬ 
lation: 

“There is no sort of intellectual or philosophical 
difficulty,” he says, “in supposing that this uni¬ 
verse is grounded in an infinite spiritual purpose 
and will; and there is no difficulty in principle 
about the occurrence of one particular manifesta¬ 
tion of it in its perfect embodiment. But it cannot 
be an intellectual statement or doctrine, because 
such a doctrine would either be a very partial 
formula or else surpass our capacity to apprehend. 
Such manifestation is only possible in one way. It 
is only possible in a Life.” 

Therefore the whole intellectual expres¬ 
sion of Christianity centers in and grows out 
of the study and understanding of the life 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


43 


of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The writings of 
the New Testament are moral and spiritual 
expositions and interpretations of that Life. 
The Church is the manifestation of that Life 
by human agencies. “We have the treasure 
in earthen vessels.” 

It must be remembered that Christianity 
has always claimed and still claims to be the 
absolute religion; that is, it is not one more 
expression of the religious instinct of man¬ 
kind, but the Revelation, once for all, of 
what that instinct means and of what is its 
object and satisfaction. Christ is all. 

The truth must also be recognized that in 
speaking of the doctrines of Christianity 
we are speaking of the revelation of truths 
objective to us; not truths which are the re¬ 
sult of our own reasoning, but that have 
been brought to us from outside our own 
consciousness and investigation. Human 
reason may approve them, but it did not in¬ 
vent them. 

It has been well said that “the fact that 
I believe in God is of very little consequence 
to anyone but myself. The important thing 


44 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


is that there is a God to believe in.” When 
Dr. Jowett, the Master of Balliol, was asked, 
“What do you think about God?” he an¬ 
swered, “That is unimportant. The only 
thing that signifies is what does God think 
about me.” So it is reported of Abraham 
Lincoln, that when someone said, “Don’t 
you think that God is on our side,” he re¬ 
plied, “My hope is that we are on God’s 
side.” 

I emphasize this objective truth because 
many today seem to be so occupied in a 
psychological analysis of their own thoughts 
and feelings that they have lost sight of the 
existence of objective and eternal Truth. 

Bishop Temple quotes the words of a 
great spiritual teacher who said: “There 
used to be a thing called Theology, which 
is Greek for thinking about God. It is very 
old-fashioned now. Instead of that there is 
a thing called the philosophy of religion, 
which means thinking about your own nice 
feelings. It is very popular.” 

However, in the New Testament and in 
the history of the early Church we are face 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


45 


to face with God. And that makes all the 
difference in the world. 

What the Christians gathered out of the 
New Testament, what was their common 
understanding of the principles of their re¬ 
ligion, is stated with remarkable clearness 
and freshness in the Epistle to Diognetus. 
This letter or address to Diognetus is 
anonymous, but it is generally acknowl¬ 
edged as a Christian document of the highest 
value, dated about the year 117 A.D., very 
close to Apostolic times. The author makes 
this statement of the common faith of the 
Christian Church, viz: 

“Our faith was not a discovery of this world; 
but God Himself, the Almighty and Invisible Cre¬ 
ator, has sent down from heaven to men His holy 
and incomprehensible Truth and Word, Him Who 
was the very Maker and Builder of all. ... If you 
love Him you will imitate His kindness . . ., and 
he who bears a brother’s burden and shares of his 
abundance to them that want, does the work of 
God.” 

What finer or truer interpretation of 
Christianity could we have than that—and 
it was written in the simplicity of his faith 


46 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


by a Christian man, less than twenty years 
after the death of St. John. 

It would be easy to multiply quotations 
to show that the Christian Church of the 
first age was simply vibrating, glowing, with 
the consciousness of God’s revelation of 
Himself as Love in the Person of Jesus 
Christ. 

Therefore the members of the Church 
were too much occupied with the practice 
of their religion, with worship and service— 
the worship of the Risen and Ascended Lord 
and the service of kindness and goodness to 
their fellow-men—to think about the formu¬ 
lation of doctrine or the subtleties of philo¬ 
sophical definition. 

There can be no question that the power 
of the Christian Church, the power that won 
her victory over Paganism, was the power 
of the good life. Human life is sacramental. 
It has been well said that “Spirit alone, with 
no material embodiment, accomplishes little 
or nothing in this world . . . . It is only 
when some concrete embodiment is found, 
that spirit becomes real and active.” And 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


47 


the faith of the early Christians, manifested 
in the virtue and beneficence of their every¬ 
day life, was the outward expression of that 
sacramental worship which we are told they 
steadfastly maintained week by week, 
thereby “showing the Lord’s death till He 
come.” 

Thus again we must bear in mind that the 
life of the Christian society in stimulating 
faith and shaping conduct—is vastly more 
important than the intellectual study of the 
documents and the inferences to be drawn 
from them. 

Yet it was inevitable that the Church 
should have a Creed. “A man is not a Chris¬ 
tian because he claims the right to believe, 
but because he does believe. And an associa¬ 
tion of those who believe must sooner or 
later compose a definition of their faith” 
(Pullan, p. 186). A man’s conduct and char¬ 
acter are the register and declaration of his 
creed. So the Creed of the Church was the 
simplest possible summary of the principles 
which constituted the rule of the Christian 
life. Clement of Alexandria calls it “The 


48 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


Church’s Rule.” Irenaeus calls it “The Rule 
of Truth.” And Tertullian calls it “The Rule 
of Faith.” 

There was a body of ascertained Truth 
which was called “the Faith.” St. Paul says, 
“Stand fast in the Faith,” and “Abide in the 
Faith.” “I have kept the Faith,” and “Some 
have erred concerning the Faith.” Indeed 
he says to Timothy, “Hold fast the form (or 
pattern) of sound words which thou hast 
heard of me.” So St. Jude says, “Contend 
earnestly for the Faith once delivered.” 

In the collection of ordinances and 
customs known as “the Apostolical Consti¬ 
tution,” of doubtful origin and authority 
sometime in the Fourth Century, it is said 
that “the Catholic Teaching” or Rule of 
Faith was drawn up by the Twelve Apostles, 
with St. James and St. Paul. It is an interest¬ 
ing tradition, showing the reverence that 
was felt for this simple rule of faith which 
we call the Apostles’ Creed, and which urn 
doubtedly was current, in forms varying in 
slight details, throughout the Church in the 
sub-Apostolic period. 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


49 


It was not, however, until the age of the 
Councils, in the years 325 A.D. and 381 
A.D., that the Catholic Church undertook, 
through its representatives in Council as¬ 
sembled, to set forth by authority a Creed 
which was to be accepted by all true Chris¬ 
tians throughout the world; and even then 
it was forced upon the Church by the mis¬ 
statements and misinterpretations of the 
opponents of Christianity. Neither the 
Council of Nice nor the Council of Constan¬ 
tinople claimed the authority to create a 
Creed. They explicitly declared that they 
were only bearing witness to what had been 
the Rule of Faith from the beginning; and 
where they used a word like “consubstan- 
tial” 'OfxoovaLos, that could not be found in 
Scripture, they were forced to use it to meet 
and contradict the erroneous and mischiev¬ 
ous subtleties of the adversaries of the 
Faith. 

The whole emphasis of the Creed is con¬ 
centrated on the Life in which the Revela¬ 
tion from God came. It deals primarily 
with the Person and character of the Lord 


50 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


Jesus Christ. Whereas there were those 
who said that there was only a partial pres¬ 
ence of Divinity, the Church declares, “Per¬ 
fect God.” Where they said that the Hu¬ 
manity was lost in the Divinity, the Church 
said, “Perfect Man.” It is one thing to con¬ 
fess that Christ was conscious of a unique 
indwelling of God, and quite a different 
thing to confess that in Him was the ful¬ 
ness of the Godhead. And the Church had 
to declare it. 

Thus the Creed, in safeguarding the Per¬ 
son of Christ, really safeguards the Chris¬ 
tian revelation of God; for the heresy of 
Arius was not merely that he denied the di¬ 
vinity of Christ, but that he held that God 
is too exalted and transcendant to be related 
to the universe except through an inter¬ 
mediary. In other words, he said that He 
Who came so near as to mingle Himself 
with the world, and Who so humbled Him¬ 
self as to become incarnate in man, could 
not be the Most High God Himself (Du 
Bose, p. 96). 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


51 


And this heresy is evident today in the 
teaching of more than one growing sect. 

And yet it contravenes the most precious 
truth of religion, viz: that God is in His 
world. He is in nature and is the force of 
nature, and His incarnation in the Christ is 
the guarantee and witness that we men and 
women are akin to God. He took not on 
Him the nature of Angels but the nature of 
man, as the Epistle to the Hebrews says. 
And this is the assurance to us also of the 
validity of our human reason and our hu¬ 
man spiritual ideals. It affects the whole 
of life, our attitude towards our fellows and 
our outlook on the world. It lays upon us 
the responsibility of infinite progress and 
the burden of a divine destiny. The Incar¬ 
nation of God in Christ—the perfect man— 
is the promise and prophecy of God's ulti¬ 
mate incarnation in the human race itself. 

The facts in the Life of Our Lord are 
stated in the Creed with clear and positive 
distinctness. Mystical religions had been 
gaining ground among the people, like the 


52 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


religion of Mithras, and the worship of 
Cybele and the various Egyptian cults, and 
all of them were religions of myth and the 
personification of the forces of Nature and 
the allegorical interpretation of the facts of 
history. But the Christian Creed is bold and 
straightforward in its appeal to the actual 
and acknowledged facts in Our Lord’s life. 
He was born of a Virgin and her name was 
Mary, and He suffered at a particular time 
under Pontius Pilate. 

At a time when the representatives of 
other religions were talking continually in 
mystic language, weaving imaginary leg¬ 
ends, and delighting in their common watch¬ 
word, “These things we talk about—these 
events—never really happened but the ideas 
they stand for are true,” at such a time it 
was wonderful to mark the strict simplicity 
of the facts—the actual, historic facts, as 
stated in the Creed—facts, we must remem¬ 
ber, not dependent for their evidence merely 
upon the written Gospels, but also upon the 
consistent and uninterrupted witness of the 
Catholic Church. 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


53 


Some of these facts are what are com¬ 
monly called “miraculous.” Therefore we 
must understand what, in Christian speech, 
that word means. 

It does not mean contrary to Nature or 
to the laws of Nature. Nature, as we Chris¬ 
tians understand it, is the manifestation of 
the will of God, and we speak of the uniform 
processes of Nature as laws, because they 
were imposed by the Divine Will. 

Any exceptional and unusual event, in the 
order of nature as we have learned it, if it 
carries with it an exceptional and unusual 
moral and spiritual purpose, may be under¬ 
stood as a direct revelation to us that the 
moral ivill of God is supreme in the world, 
however it may be veiled and hidden from 
us ordinarily by the operation of secondary 
causes. 

This is what we claim for the so-called 
miraculous events stated in the Creed. 

After all, it is a question as to whether 
there is such a thing as free personal will 
in the universe. We believe that man has 
the precious gift of moral freedom, limited, 


54 CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 

indeed, but real, and manifested in every de¬ 
partment of his life and work. This human 
freedom is the highest and truest witness in 
nature to the personality and free will of 
God, the Creator and Source of life. There 
is perfect free-will and perfect reason in 
God. 

The alternative to this is a blind, mechan¬ 
ical universe, subject to a dumb Fate, a 
clammy and irrational conception of the 
scheme of things, where there is no freedom 
in man or God. 

As Bishop Gore says, “The question of 
the reality of moral freedom and the ques¬ 
tion of the credibility of miracles are at the 
bottom one and the same question.” 

The moral and spiritual issues involved 
justified the special manifestation of God’s 
Will, for example, in the Virgin Birth of 
Christ. 

If we grant that there was or could have 
been an Incarnation of God, then it cer¬ 
tainly constituted a creative epoch in the 
history of humanity. As Dr. W. P. DuBose 
says: 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


55 


“Because Jesus Christ is at once the most divine 
and the most human fact and factor in the history 
and experience of our race, the problem of His Per¬ 
son became at once the impulse and starting-point 
of an entire science of God, of man, and of the 
essential and final relations between God and 
man.” “In the womb of the Virgin, the Holy Ghost 
is not the divine Begetter nor the divine Begotten; 
but reveals His operation in the grace of the human 
conception and child-bearing. The Holy Ghost is 
mother, not of the act by which the Word, the Lo¬ 
gos of God, became flesh, but of the preparation 
and ability of the flesh to be assumed by the Word. 
. . . By the Word, the Logos, God begets; by the 
Spirit humanity conceives and bears; through both 
God is incarnated and humanity is regenerated and 
redeemed” (“Councils” I, 31). 

As Dr. John P. Peters used to say: There 
is no explanation that can be given of how 
and when life came into matter. Every ex¬ 
periment to get life from matter itself has 
failed. Whenever it came, it came as a Vir¬ 
gin Birth. Prof. Tyndall said that the gulf 
between the interaction of the brain mole¬ 
cules and the fact of consciousness never 
could be bridged. And we say that when¬ 
ever the animal, man, became endowed with 


56 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


mental and moral self-consciousness, it was 
a Virgin Birth. However, the Church has 
no quarrel even with those who accept the 
theory of evolution in its extreme form and 
who believe that these gaps in the process, 
viz: the development of organic matter from 
inorganic and of rationality out of animal 
mind, may some day be closed by the dis¬ 
covery of new facts, although the very latest 
statement of professional scientific experts 
is that “as to the question of the ancestry 
of man, its final solution, if solved it ever 
will be, is not yet in sight” (Dr. Barclay- 
Smith, in “Problems of Science”). 

Let us accept the theory of evolution; 
but evolution originates nothing, invents 
nothing, causes nothing. “It is only a name 
for the gradual way in which God’s pur¬ 
poses are unfolded in the field of existence; 
and the gradual way whereby in the field of 
knowledge they came to be recognized by 
man” (Illingworth); in other words, the 
gradual way in which God is working, and 
the gradual way in which we find it out. As 
Aristotle said long ago, “The beginning 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


57 


must be interpreted by the end”; and the in¬ 
tellectual, moral, and spiritual nature of man, 
no matter what was the process of its evolu¬ 
tion, came from an intellectual, moral, and 
spiritual source. Whoever made the acorn 
made the tree. The theory of evolution not 
only does not contradict the idea or fact of 
God; it is absolutely impossible without 
God. 

The loose talk of a lot of would-be phil¬ 
osophers has assumed for the theory of evo¬ 
lution vastly more than any real, thorough¬ 
going scientist would ever claim. As Henry 
Bergson says: “I see in the whole evolution 
of life on our planet a crossing of matter by 
a creative consciousness, an effort to set 
free, by force of ingenuity and invention, 
something which in the animal still remains 
imprisoned, and is only finally released when 
we reach man.” (See Gore, p. 59.) 

The Church’s doctrine of spiritual reality 
can never conflict with the proved results 
of physical science. They move in different 
planes. 


58 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


“A fire-mist and a planet, 

A crystal and a cell, 

A jelly-fish and a saurian, 

And caves where the cave-men dwell; 

Then a sense of law and beauty, 

And a face turned from the clod; 

Some call it Evolution, 

And others call it God. 

“Like tides on a crescent sea-beach, 

When the moon is new and thin, 

Into our hearts high yearnings 
Come welling and surging in; 

Come from the mystic ocean, 

Whose rim no foot has trod, 

Some of us call it Longing, 

And others call it God.” 

It was some time before the thinkers of 
the Church came to realize the true signif¬ 
icance and importance of the Virgin Birth 
as the starting point of that new creation in 
Christ, of which St. Paul speaks in the sec¬ 
ond letter to the Corinthians: If any man 
be in Christ, he is a new creation. Old 
things are passed away and all things are 
become new. 

But the statement of the fact itself and 


THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


59 


the insistence upon it, even by heretics out¬ 
side the Church, as an acknowledged truth 
of history, are continuous from the first. 
The earliest Christian Creed contains it. It 
is stated with emphasis by Ignatius, who 
was a contemporary of the Apostles, and by 
Aristides and Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus 
and Tertullian, all in the second century, 
and they refer to it as a well-established 
part of the Christian tradition. 

St. Mark's Gospel, it is true, begins with 
Our Lord's baptism and does not mention 
the boyhood or infancy: but on the other 
hand, it is St. Mark who tells us that the 
people called Jesus “the Son of Mary." St. 
Luke's account of the infancy is one of the 
most delicate and beautiful narratives in the 
literature of the world; a story, as Dr. San- 
day has said, that was evidently told by a 
woman from a woman; and this witness of 
St. Luke has become more weighty and con¬ 
clusive since eminent critics today are mak¬ 
ing powerful arguments to show that St. 
Luke's is the Gospel upon which both St. 
Mark and St. Matthew largely based their 


60 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


narratives, and that St. Luke got his infor¬ 
mation from St. John. (See art. by the Rev. 
W. Lockton in “Ch. Quart. Rev.," July, 
1922.) As for St. Paul’s failure to mention 
explicitly the Virgin Birth, we can only say 
that he certainly expressed belief in the Di¬ 
vine Personal pre-existence of Our Lord, 
and in at least two of his letters (Rom. I, 3, 
and Gal. IV, 4) uses phraseology that is 
most apposite to a belief in the Virgin Birth. 
He certainly believed that God was made 
man, and not that a man was made God! 
And that is the real question at issue. Any¬ 
how, there is no break nor exception to the 
witness borne by the whole Church in every 
age, and while it is possible to distinguish 
in thought between the fact of the Incarna¬ 
tion and the fact of the Virgin Birth, 
“there is," as Dr. Bernard says, “a congruity 
between the two beliefs which cannot be ex¬ 
plained away." 


This and the other articles of the Creed 
come to us as the mature judgment of the 
Catholic Church, the basis and foundation 



THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 


61 


of all that she has taught and all that she 
has done for the moral and spiritual benefit 
of mankind. 

Upon these articles of the Creed, and 
growing out of them, has been built up by 
great thinkers and teachers a body of doc¬ 
trine, a real science of God and man, which 
we call theology; but the Creed, with its 
simple and clear statements, is the only de¬ 
fined Truth which has been set forth by the 
authority of the whole Church. 

It defines with sufficient clearness the 
Revelation of God’s Person and Nature, and 
His relation to us. 

It imposes upon us no hard, mechanical 
system, but leaves us room for the exercise 
of our own reason and understanding in ap¬ 
plying these fundamental truths to the prob¬ 
lems of each succeeding age. 

Finally it puts the emphasis upon our loy¬ 
alty to the Lord Jesus Christ; for Christ is 
all. He furnishes and He is, the new motive 
and the new end of life, the satisfaction of 
the intellect and heart and conscience of 
mankind. 


62 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


Some, perhaps many, will not accept this 
solution of the world’s problems and will 
not acknowledge this allegiance. We cannot 
help it. We have learned through Christ the 
law of love for all mankind. We think that 
we are trying to obey that law and we bow 
our heads humbly before the criticisms of 
those who charge us with weakness and un¬ 
worthiness. We admit that the Church, 
human in its administration, has not ful¬ 
filled or persuaded its people to fulfil all that 
law of love and brotherhood; but we also 
claim that the record of history gives credit 
to the Church for a beneficent and saving 
influence. And as we look out upon a discon¬ 
tented, distracted world today, we can see 
no power to help it, no hope to encourage 
it, no light to guide it, but Him Who loved 
us and gave Himself for us. 

“Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day and cease to be; 

They are but broken lights of Thee, 

And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.” 


LECTURE IV 

THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 

I HAVE said in the previous lecture that 
the Creed contains the only statement 
of Revealed Truth that the Catholic Church 
has formally set forth as the fundamental 
and necessary faith of a Christian; but there 
is one doctrine which is so obviously implied 
in this summary of the Faith, that it de¬ 
serves a fuller exposition; and that doctrine 
we know as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 

Our age seems to be impatient of any in¬ 
tellectual definition of Spiritual Truth, and 
we are being warned constantly by writers 
on the subject of religion not to insist upon 
dogmas, as though dogma, which is nothing 
more than the definite statement of the 
truth, were somehow incompatible with 
spiritual experience. But as men and women 
who are endowed with reason, we are 
obliged, as the Apostle says, to give a rea- 


64 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


son for the hope that is in us. Either we 
know something about God and Christ, or 
we do not know anything. If we say that 
we do know, then we are committed to 
dogma and we cannot help stating it. 


The primary and fundamental dogma of 
Christianity is this: The Eternal Son of 
God, for us men and for our salvation, was 
made man and lived a human life. The 
Church has preserved for us through nine¬ 
teen centuries a brief record of His Life on 
earth and His sayings about God and man. 
In these sayings He has revealed more 
about the nature of God than man has dis¬ 
covered or could discover by himself, and 
He definitely referred to God as Father, 
Son, and Holy Spirit. The Church, firmly 
convinced that, in doing so, she was guided 
by the Holy Spirit, formulated this teaching 
for the purpose of transmission through the 
ages in terms which were justified by the 
record. 

The immediate disciples of Christ speak 
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit 



THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 65 


as three distinguishable Persons; and yet 
these Persons are so mutually inclusive, so 
absolutely inseparable in their operation, 
that there is but One God. The Father is 
not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, 
yet these three are one. 

It is not necessary to make extensive quo¬ 
tations from the New Testament to prove 
these two propositions. The Gospels, Acts, 
and Epistles abound in illustrations of their 
truth. 

And it is important to note that this sim¬ 
ple belief in God as Father, Son, and Spirit, 
originating, as it did, in the unreasoned ac¬ 
ceptance of the example and teaching of 
Christ, has been found, after centuries of re¬ 
flection and actual experiment, to be the 
most practically efficient conception of God 
that has appeared in the world. It has satis¬ 
fied the demands of reason. It has brought 
the truth of the Divine Personality home to 
men in a new and unique degree. It has fur¬ 
nished the basis of a Christian philosophy of 
life and action unrivalled in the history of 
human thought. 


66 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


We must emphasize the fact that in the 
history of the doctrine of the Trinity, as in 
that of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrec¬ 
tion, the facts came first, and only slowly, 
by degrees, did the Christian leaders con¬ 
struct a theology which took account of and 
interpreted the facts. Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit are names for God throughout the 
New Testament, and each One is referred to 
as a Person, and yet not as separate from 
one another, but as having one being, one 
mind, and one activity. St. John says that 
the promised coming of the Spirit involves 
Christ’s coming; for the other Paraclete is 
not to be a substitute for Christ’s absence, 
but the agent of His presence. So also Our 
Lord says that His own coming is the Fa¬ 
ther’s coming. “We will come unto you” 
(St. John XIV, 16). 


The average Christian found this concep¬ 
tion of God true for his actual, everyday 
life. He simply lived the truth of it. God 
was his loving Father, and he realized this 
in the communion and fellowship of the 



THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 67 


Body of Christ, the Church, where he felt 
the power of the Divine Presence by the 
operation of the Holy Spirit. He did not 
reason it out; he knew. And this kind of liv¬ 
ing faith produced the great Saints of 
Christendom—men and women who ven¬ 
tured all for Christ, to whom to live was 
Christ and to die was gain, who inaugu¬ 
rated the innumerable philanthropies and 
charitable activities that have blessed the 
world. They built hospitals for the sick, 
homes for the poor, asylums for the blind 
and mentally diseased. They left home and 
country and abandoned all the joy and com¬ 
fort of social and family life, and devoted 
themselves gladly to the great adventure of 
Christ for God. As we read in the Acts, 
“They rejoiced that they were counted 
worthy to suffer shame for His Name” And 
in the quiet and humble walks of life, as 
citizens and fathers and husbands, and as 
wives and mothers, and sons and daugh¬ 
ters, their lives shed abroad a benignant 
and beneficent light which those who saw 
and felt it knew to be a light that came from 


68 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


Heaven. And in ten thousand ways today 
these lives are being lived and this witness 
is being borne, whether the world is willing 
to believe it or not; and the consecration and 
unselfish love of Christian Missions shines 
today with as fine a heroism as any that 
ever illuminated the pages of the history of 
the Church of God. 

This, we claim, was and is the practical 
effect in human life of that faith in the In¬ 
carnation of God to which we give intel¬ 
lectual expression in the doctrine of the 
Holy Trinity. 

Out of the life, therefore, out of the daily 
experience, the intellectual formulation of 
doctrine grew. It was true here, as it was 
true of all Our Lord’s sayings, that al¬ 
though sometimes they appeared to be para¬ 
doxes, when they were studied and applied 
they commended themselves to the reason. 
Just as the Lord said: “He that willeth to 
do My will shall know the doctrine.” 


It was inevitable that Christian thinkers 
should meditate upon Our Lord’s revelation 



THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 69 


of God and endeavor to arrive at a formula 
that would conveniently express it and hand 
it on for use in catechetical teaching; but 
they realized fully the inadequacy of any 
human words accurately to convey the 
meaning of the mystery. For of course the 
doctrine of the infinite, omnipotent, and 
omniscient God is bound to be mysterious. 
But by mystery we do not mean the un¬ 
knowable or the unreal or untrue. A mys¬ 
tery is a truth which is only partially re¬ 
vealed, like the sun behind a cloud, or the 
moon in one of its phases. There are no 
words to express completely the nature of 
God. We say three persons in one God, and 
that is the best we can do. Without doubt 
all our formulas will be found to be poor and 
shallow and inadequate when we see Him 
face to face. Yet the formula the Church 
has sanctioned is sufficient for us to live by. 
And anyhow the idea of three-ness in unity 
commends itself to reason. St. Augustine, 
fifteen hundred years ago, used the analogy 
of the fundamental Self, with its thought or 
word, and its will or affection. The analogy, 


70 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


he said, was imperfect indeed, but it helped 
us to grasp the idea. So all through Nature 
the three-ness in unity is found. Prof. Tyn¬ 
dall proved by experiments with the solar 
spectrum that any intensely heated body 
emits at the same time three rays, differing 
in their results but forming such a unity as 
to be inseparable. There is first the “heat” 
ray, which is felt but not seen; there is sec¬ 
ondly the “light” ray, which is seen but not 
felt; and there is thirdly the “actinic” ray, 
which is neither felt nor seen, but which is 
known by its chemical action upon certain 
substances. Yet these three are one; for no 
one of them can exist except in conjunction 
with the others. 

So also in Hegel’s analysis of the fact of 
human consciousness. There are always 
three factors, viz: the subject Ego, and the 
objected Ego, and the synthesis of the two. 
I and myself and self-consciousness. 

Thus we grope and speculate and find 
analogies, which seem to light our way, al¬ 
though we know all the time that no finite 


THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 71 


symbol in space and time can adequately 
represent the Eternal Truth. 

We believe that God is Personal, that He 
can hear us when we call and pray to Him. 
We believe that He is Goodness and Love, 
and that these characteristics in their ful¬ 
ness imply relation to equals; and these rela¬ 
tions which we call social exist within the 
unity of the Godhead without detracting 
from its absolute eternal nature. God is not 
a cold, isolated unit, but in the unity of the 
Godhead there is a fellowship of Persons, 
united in the bond of that perfect Love, of 
which the most beautiful and perfect human 
love is but the reflection and imitation. For, 
as Bishop Gore says, “Personality in man 
emerges out of fellowship and always in¬ 
volves fellowship. It is only in fellowship 
that we begin to realize ourselves, and the 
more widely we expand into fellowship the 
more we realize ourselves.” Or, as we may 
say, The measure of a man's manhood is 
the measure of his vision. The wider are 
his sympathies, the more of a man he is. 


72 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


And the foundation of this law is in the na¬ 
ture of the Most High. The Eternal Being 
is fellowship: and God is Love: the Love of 
the Father, revealed in the Son, through the 
Holy Spirit. 

Thus, I say again, we try to think our way 
to God. You remember what St. Paul said 
to the Athenians, God made men that they 
should seek God, if haply they might feel af¬ 
ter Him and find Him, though He is not far 
from each one of us, for in Him we live and 
move and have our being! Or, as the phil¬ 
osopher Lotze said: “If reason is not of it¬ 
self capable of finding the highest truth, but 
on the contrary stands in need of a revela¬ 
tion, still reason must be able to understand 
the revealed truth, at least so far as to rec¬ 
ognize in it the satisfying and convincing 
conclusion of those upward soaring trains 
of thought, which reason itself began, led by 
its own needs, but was not able to bring to 
an end” (quoted by Gore, p. 253). 

This is the claim of the Christian doctrine 
of the Holy Trinity. It does not completely 
unfold or explain the Nature of God—the 


THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 73 


human mind cannot compass the Infinite— 
but it saves us from the deadly remoteness 
of Deism and the individual annihilation of 
Pantheism, and assures us of our right to 
communion with God. It enables us to see, 
although “through a glass darkly,” how God 
is Love, how His Incarnation is conceiv¬ 
able, and how men may thereby be raised, 
without loss of personal identity, into con¬ 
scious communion with the fulness of the 
divine Life, “the fulness of Him, Who filleth 
all in all” (Illingworth, p. 249). 

To sum up the argument, we may quote 
the words of Archbishop D’Arcy: 

“The proof of the doctrine of the Trinity remains 
then, for us, where it has always been. It depends 
upon the Christian revelation. The doctrine comes 
to light, whenever men accept the facts of the life 
of Christ, and honestly and intelligently attempt 
to discover the theory of the Divine Nature which 
is implied in them. Or, in other words, the doctrine 
of the Trinity is the theoretical pre-supposition of 
the Christian Religion” (quoted by Illingworth). 

There are two or three misconceptions of 
Christian doctrine to which I must refer be¬ 
fore concluding this lecture. As the Chris- 


74 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


tian fathers felt and frequently declared 
that the language they used to express the 
doctrine of the Trinity was inadequate and 
accommodated to the limitations of human 
understanding, so there are words in the 
New Testament and the Creed which have 
always been understood to be symbolical, 
simply because they are used to describe 
events and happenings beyond the range of 
human knowledge and experience. 

In order to denote the final triumph and 
supremacy of Christ, He is spoken of as 
“sitting on the Right Hand of God”; but no 
intelligent person took that statement in a 
literal sense. So, in order to describe the 
withdrawal of Christ, the Lord, from the 
visible and external order of things, they 
spoke of His Ascension into Heaven—be¬ 
cause any withdrawal from the earthly 
sphere of life would seem to ordinary sight 
to be an Ascension, whether it took place 
at the equator or the antipodes. In like man¬ 
ner, our Lord’s death is described as a 
descent into Hades; *A 1 %, that is, the un¬ 
seen; the sphere or region of departed souls; 


THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 75 


and the use of the words “descend” and 
“ascend” (KarajSaivw, av a (3 a tv i u) by St. Paul 
(Rom. X, 7, Ephes. IV, 10) is obviously in¬ 
tended to be symbolical and suggests the 
profound thought that the soul at death 
does not “wing its flight” to some distant 
place, but withdraws itself into the interior, 
essential, and real sphere of existence. 
These words were understood by the early 
Christian writers to be symbolical attempts 
to state mysterious and indescribable hap¬ 
penings, in the Life of their Divine Lord and 
Saviour. As Gregory of Nyssa said fifteen 
hundred years ago: “The soul is imma¬ 
terial. It is not detained in a place. Hades 
simply means the invisible.” 

All such expressions in the New Testa¬ 
ment and the Creed are absolutely and ut¬ 
terly different from the bold and clear-cut 
statement of fact by St. Luke: “In the fif¬ 
teenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, 
Pontius Pilate being Governor of Judea,” 
etc., Jesus was born of a Virgin in Bethle¬ 
hem. 

It seems strange that good men should 


76 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


try to discredit the doctrinal statements of 
the Church by ignoring the essential differ¬ 
ence between the kinds of events that lan¬ 
guage is used to describe and by the whole¬ 
sale depreciation of the intelligence of the 
early Christian writers. As Bishop Gore has 
shown conclusively, the great minds of an¬ 
tiquity, like Clement and Origen and the 
Gregories and Jerome and Augustine, were 
not committed to mere childish notions of 
Heaven and Hell as particular localities in 
space. Indeed, St. Jerome ridicules these 
childish notions and says: “It is nonsense 
to say that heaven is curved like an arch, 
and that a throne is placed in heaven and 
that God sits upon it as a commander or 
judge.” 

The whole question resolves itself into the 
ancient problem of the will to believe. There 
is no such thing as the dry light of reason; 
but every human is subject to pre-posses¬ 
sions: “If they hear not Moses and the 
Prophets, neither will they be persuaded 
though One rose from the dead.” 

Only the Holy Spirit can touch and 


THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 77 


quicken the minds and hearts of those who 
have allowed themselves to drift into an at¬ 
titude of indifference, of inertia, of agnos¬ 
ticism, with regard to the spiritual values 
and facts of life. Their assumption is, that 
God and immortality are negligible subjects 
of discussion and hopeless enigmas, as a 
recent writer calls them; that their excep¬ 
tional knowledge of the universe justifies 
them in denying the possibility of the direct 
manifestation of the Divine Will in human 
affairs, and all their thoughts and acts are 
really based on this assumption; whereas St. 
Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “I deter¬ 
mined not to know anything among you 
save Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (I 
Cor. II. 2). 

And so we Christians build our thoughts 
and lives on faith; the faith that God did 
reveal Himself in and through Jesus Christ, 
that Jesus is God Incarnate, and that His 
love and mercy and truth and justice are the 
manifestation of God’s nature and character. 

We start with this prepossession, and it 
colors and affects all our thoughts and con- 


78 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


elusions and judgments. Philosophy and 
science may expand and enrich the content 
of our faith, but they cannot supply nor 
change the basis of it. That is fixed. As 
Browning says: 

“I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it, 

And has so far advanced thee to be wise. 

Wouldst thou improve this, to re-prove the proved? 
In life’s mere minute, with power to use that proof, 
Leave Knowledge and revert to how it sprung? 
Thou hast it: Use it, and forthwith: or die.” 

This is no mere intellectual system, no 
occult or formal philosophy. It is simple 
enough for the untutored mind to grasp and 
live by, while it is deep enough to engage 
and satisfy the mind of the greatest genius 
on the earth. And men and women and 
little children, who are ignorant, as this 
world counts ignorance, and who yet prac¬ 
tise self-denial and endure suffering pa¬ 
tiently, and live nobly, for His sake and for 
love of Him Who died to save them, have at- 


THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 79 


tained a height of spiritual knowledge which 
is oft hid from the wise and prudent but is 
revealed unto babes. 

And here arises the inevitable divergence 
of the Christian mind from the non-Chris¬ 
tian mind along all the paths of knowledge 
and critical research. 

The Christian, for example, cannot dis¬ 
cuss human immortality as an open ques¬ 
tion, and therefore he finds it difficult to 
combat theories and systems and modes of 
thought, which today covertly but actually 
assume the denial of this elementary and 
fundamental truth. 

In the same way, the Christian believer 
sees no contradiction of his faith in the use 
of his reason to discriminate between the 
human and the divine elements in the Bible, 
and can only be amazed to see the results 
of his critical research take on new and 
strange and deadly significance, when ex¬ 
ploited by men who have no convictions to 
begin with, and who enter upon the investi¬ 
gation with a strong prepossession against 


80 CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 

any kind of revelation through Christ or 
anyone else, and in fact against the spiritual 
and eternal order of the world. 

So the will to believe or the will not to 
believe will affect our interpretation of any 
fact of human experience or testimony, in¬ 
dependently of the use of minds of equal 
caliber, whether it be the Virgin Birth, or 
the Resurrection, or the Ascension, or the 
doctrine of the Trinity. 

So St. John says to us, '-Try the spirits,” 
and he is not speaking of disembodied spir¬ 
its, but of men and women who may claim 
to have the spirit. “Try the spirits whether 
they are of God.” “Every spirit that con¬ 
fessed that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh 
is of God.” 

That is the test today, as it was in the 
beginning, and its modern value is illus¬ 
trated by the fact that the most recent re¬ 
ligion in America definitely rejects it. 

Brethren: We are here for a time. The 
days tarry, but the years fly swiftly. Soon 
for each one of us all problems will be 
solved, all perplexities will be banished by 


THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH 81 


the fact of death. Therefore we shall live 
and work by this assurance: This is life, 
eternal life, “to know Thee, the only true 
God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast 
sent.” 

God grant that life's experience here, 
whether it be bright or dark, or glad or sor¬ 
rowful, may be to us the increasing revela¬ 
tion of His unutterable compassion: 

“O Thou great Friend to all the sons of men 

Who once appeared in humblest guise below, 
Sin to rebuke, to break the captive's chain, 

And call Thy brethren forth from want and 
woe; 

We look to Thee; Thy Truth is still the Light 
Which guides the nations, groping on their way, 
Stumbling and falling in disastrous night, 

Yet hoping ever for the perfect day." 


LECTURE V 

THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 

I T will appear from the preceding lec¬ 
tures that the Christian religion centers 
in one great dogma—the Incarnation of God 
in Christ. It is pre-eminently the religion of 
a Person. Mohammedanism is the religion 
of a Book—the Koran. Buddhism is the re¬ 
ligion of a method. But Christianity is the 
loyal devotion and obedience to One Person, 
Jesus Christ, who, in a unique sense, is 
both the Son of God and the Son of Man. 
He is the brightness of His Father’s glory 
and the express image of His Person, and 
He was made man for us. He spake as never 
man spake. He uttered the ultimate word. 
There has been no important religious truth 
in any age that is not contained in the brief 
record of His life. It is enough for us Chris¬ 
tians to know that whatever we are asked 
to believe comes to us with the authority of 
Christ. 


THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 


83 


Moreover, it is His unique claim which 
separates Him from all other religious 
teachers of history, that He came into the 
world, not merely to be an example of good 
life for us to follow, and not merely to lay 
down His life on our behalf, but above and 
beyond either of these He came to impart 
His life to us. I came, He said, that ye might 
have life and that ye might have it more 
abundantly. “I am the Vine; ye are the 
branches. Abide in Me and I in you .” “I am 
the Bread of Life.” “He that eateth Me even 
he shall live by Me.” 

This impartation of Christ's life is the dis¬ 
tinctive dynamic of the Christian religion. 
Many other teachers have taught beautiful 
and noble truths, but Jesus alone declares 
that He communicates His life to men. 
Therefore, His religion acts upon the whole 
man—body, soul, and spirit—and affects the 
whole of life. It brings to bear upon those 
who have faith to receive it, forces from out¬ 
side, forces that we did not invent, forces 
that are stronger than we are; and the 
Church from the first age has taught that 


84 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


the normal and authorized way by which, 
through the operation of the Holy Spirit, 
these forces are brought to bear upon men's 
lives, is the Sacramental System. It is not 
said that the sacraments are the only way 
by which the Spirit operates; but that they 
are the normal and ordinary way. 

It was Christ Himself Who, with the 
most solemn words, instituted the Sacra¬ 
ments of Baptism and the Holy Commu¬ 
nion. His last command was, “Go ye and 
make disciples of all nations, baptizing 
them into the Name of the Father and the 
Son and the Holy Ghost"; and on the night 
before His Passion, He instituted the Holy 
Communion, saying, “Do this in remem¬ 
brance of Me." St. John's Gospel does not 
report the institution of either sacrament, 
but takes them for granted and supplements 
the record, giving us the discourse with 
Nicodemus, “Except a man be born again of 
water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the 
Kingdom," and the discourse at Caper¬ 
naum, “I am the Bread of Life. * * He that 
eateth Me even he shall live by Me." So St. 


THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 


85 


Paul Speaks of the “Laver of Regeneration,” 
and tells us “As often as ye eat this bread and 
drink this cup ye do shew the Lord’s death 
till He come.” And the unvarying rever¬ 
ence for these sacramental rites and their 
unfailing administration through all the 
eighteen hundred years of Christian history 
is an impregnable testimony to the truth of 
the Gospel record and the essential meaning 
of the religion, viz: the personal loyalty and 
devotion to the Living Christ and faith in 
His continuing power to help and to save. 


Thus, we see that, as God’s way of reveal¬ 
ing Himself to men was through a Life that 
was lived under the conditions of our mor¬ 
tality, so the sacraments are the perpetual 
witnesses and guarantees of the reality and 
continuance of that Life, and so they have 
been appropriately called “the extension of 
the Incarnation.” We notice also that both 
these sacraments, instituted by Christ, are 
social rites, implying a social system, and 
therefore we are not surprised to find that 
Our Lord constantly speaks in the Gospel 



86 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


about His Kingdom, a Kingdom right here 
on this earth, composed of men and women; 
like a net, He says, “containing fish both 
bad and good”; or like a field, where the 
tares and wheat grow together until the 
harvest. A Church, divine in its origin, but 
human in its administration. 

It is all of one piece and perfectly clear to 
those who want to see it. “First,” the social 
institution, the fellowship one with another 
in Christ, with all that flows out of that. 
Then the two social sacraments, viz: Bap¬ 
tism, which makes us members of the Body, 
the Church, and Communion, which com¬ 
memorates the great sacrifice of unselfish 
love and keeps up the life-giving process in 
the Body. And this fits in with and explains 
St. Luke’s description in the Acts of the be¬ 
ginning of the infant society: “Then they 
that gladly received his word were baptized: 
and the same day there were added unto 
them about three thousand souls,” and “The 
Lord added to the Church daily such as were 
being saved”; and those who were baptized 
continued daily in the Apostles’ teaching 


THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 


87 


and fellowship, in the Breaking of Bread, 
and the Prayers. 

Here we have the whole Christian system 
in one sentence: The Apostles’ “teaching”: 
That is the Creed, the “form of sound 
words,” as St. Paul calls it, “the faith once 
delivered” of St. Jude. The “Fellowship”: 
That is the Church, the ordered, organized, 
administered society of baptized men and 
women. The “Breaking of Bread” is the 
Holy Communion, and the “Prayers,” the 
Public Worship. 

And what began on that Day of Pentecost 
has continued ever since, and it is fair to say 
that the very forms of prayer in which the 
sacraments were administered then are in 
use now, as they have been for more than 
eighteen hundred years. 

It has been well said by a recent writer 
(Dr. S. C. Carpenter, “A Large Room,” 
p. 62) : “It is certain that in the early days of 
Christianity, the converts of the period, cer¬ 
tainly the Gentile and to some extent the 
Tew, would not have understood or accepted 
a non-sacramental faith.” “The Christian Re- 


88 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


ligion," says Dr. Adolf Harnack (“Expans, 
of Christianity/' p. 286), “was intelligible 
and impressive owing to the fact that it of¬ 
fered men sacraments. . . . Every hand that 
was stretched out for religion, tried to 
grasp it in a sacramental form. And the two 
most sublime spiritualists of the Church, 
namely St. John and Origen, were the two 
most profound exponents of the Mys¬ 
teries." 

This would seem to be enough to justify 
and enforce the Church’s insistence upon 
the reverence due to the sacraments and the 
reality of the sacramental life; but it is 
worth while to consider for a few moments 
the wider meaning of this idea of Sacra¬ 
ment, and the interpretation of human life 
and work that it implies. 


The group of so-called “intellectuals" 
who are trying to discredit historical Chris¬ 
tianity today are for the most part bald ma¬ 
terialists and are advocates of the pseudo¬ 
scientific creed, viz: that humanity is prog¬ 
ressing towards some undefined goal by an 



THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 


89 


impersonal, mechanical process called evo¬ 
lution. But the temptation of religious men 
is to Dualism. Dualism is one of the oldest 
cults in history. It is essentially the belief 
in the necessary contrariety of matter and 
spirit, and therefore the separation of the 
material world from God. It manifests it¬ 
self in many ways. In some cases it means 
the denial of the possibility of God, the good 
spirit, acting through matter which is evil. 
So the early Gnostics, a quasi-Christian 
sect, said that the God of the Old Testament 
was an evil Being, because He created the 
physical universe; and the modern cult 
called Christian Science refuses to admit the 
Incarnation of God in Christ on the ground 
that God could not come into such close con¬ 
tact with evil matter. This Dualistic con¬ 
ception shows itself in the English Deism of 
the Eighteenth Century which divorced God 
from His world, in Mohammedanism and 
the extreme forms of Calvinism, and in the 
various phases of Manicheism, which seeks 
to build the good life upon negations by an 
ascetic prohibition of certain forms of 


90 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


amusement and physical enjoyment. Dual¬ 
ism, in all its forms, denies in greater or less 
degree the compatibility, the correspon¬ 
dence, of matter and spirit, and in so doing 
it contradicts the most obvious fact of hu¬ 
man knowledge. 

For we are ourselves the first object of 
human knowledge; and we know ourselves 
to be spiritual beings acting through and by 
means of physical bodies; and can anyone 
say which part of the body is the most spir¬ 
itual part? It is the soul that perceives, that 
feels, by means of the physical senses. It is 
the soul that reasons by means of the phys¬ 
ical brain: and every emotion of the soul and 
every thought involves the activity of some 
material cell. 

How foolish it is to talk about the neces¬ 
sary contradiction and incompatibility of 
matter and spirit. Indeed, Modern Science 
has virtually proved that the physical world 
is only the manifestation of energy or force. 
The Aristotelian conception of matter as 
material substance no longer obtains in 
physics, and the X-Ray, the electron, and 


THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 91 


the radio-activity, have changed our ideas 
of physical energy and action. With the 
Einstein dynamics, matter has disappeared, 
and the electromagnetic mass and energy 
have become interchangeable. (See Dr. Os¬ 
born Taylor, p. 225.) To my mind, the con¬ 
clusion is inescapable that the universe, so 
far from being the result of a blind, irra¬ 
tional chance, is the manifestation every¬ 
where of force, and we know force as will, 
and the universe is the result, the manifes¬ 
tation of a rational Personality. The best 
science is coming to this conviction. 

Anyhow, historic Christianity has always 
repudiated Dualism and sees God as imma¬ 
nent in His universe; not confined to the 
universe, as the Pantheist would say; not 
separated from the universe, as the Dualist 
would say; but acting in and through His 
physical universe. God is Love: and Love is 
the sacrifice, the “out”going of self; and the 
universe is the utterance, the “out”-erance, of 
God. God acting is God uttering—“out”- 
ering Himself. So St. John speaks of the 
Utterance of God—the Logos, the Word, by 


92 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


Whom all things were made. Not another 
God, but the utterance of the One God, as 
my word is the utterance of my thought. As 
St. Paul says, God's dear Son, Who is be¬ 
fore all things, and by Whom all things con¬ 
sist. The Spirit of Christ is the dynamic 
force of the physical world. Or, as Mrs. 
Browning, with poetic insight, reminds us: 

“Natural things and spiritual! 

Who separates these two 

In Art or Morals or in Social drift 

Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse, 

Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men— 

Is wrong in short at all points. 

No lily-muffled hum of summer bee 

But finds some coupling with the spinning stars; 

No pebble at our feet but proves the sphere; 

No chaffinch but implies the cherubim. 

For Earth is crammed with Heaven, 

And every common bush afire with God; 

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.” 

This is the sacramental idea in Christian¬ 
ity. It ennobles science; it exalts literature; 
it glorifies art. It is the transfiguration of 
our common human life. 

For life itself is a sacrament, the obliga- 


THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 93 


tion and opportunity of proving our divine 
origin and destiny. The poet says that life 
is the opportunity of learning love, of show¬ 
ing love, and that is nothing more nor less 
than showing forth the unselfish life of 
Christ. As the Apostle tells us, “That was 
the true light that lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world”; and again, “Know 
ye not that Christ dwelleth in you,” For 
“Christ is in you, the hope of glory.” 

This is the problem that every man and 
woman must face, viz: whether we shall per¬ 
mit our spiritual aspiration to be choked and 
smothered, and the Christ Who is in us be 
crucified and defeated, or whether we shall 
encourage and develop our spiritual nature, 
and let the Christ in us—our own Christ— 
have free course and be glorified in our life 
and thought. 

“The truth is within ourselves: 

There is an inmost center in us all 
Where Truth abides in fulness, 

And around it, wall upon wall, 

The gross flesh hems it in and makes all error, 
And to know would rather seem to be 


94 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


To open up a way for the imprisoned splendor to 
escape; 

For men have oft grown old among their books 
To die case-hardened in their ignorance.” 

St. Paul says that "The whole creation 
waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of 
God/’ that is, for the sons of God to ac¬ 
knowledge and show themselves to be the 
sons of God; and when all the sons of God 
shall show themselves to be the sons of God, 
then shall the Kingdom come and the glory 
of the Lord our God shall cover the earth 
as the waters cover the sea. Just as the In¬ 
carnation was the visible manifestation and 
sacrament of God’s nature under the condi¬ 
tions of human life, so the visible Church is 
intended to be the sacrament, the manifes¬ 
tation of the divine ideal in human society. 

Of course this is a very lofty ideal of 
human life, far removed from that fatalistic 
materialism and agnosticism that would 
make us mere brutes and clods. And we 
may well ask, "Who is sufficient for these 
things?” 

Therefore the Catholic Church has wisely 


THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 95 


invested every important relation and event 
of life with a sacramental significance. 
When the baptized child has come to years 
of discretion and must repeat for himself 
the baptismal vows and renew the baptismal 
gift, there is the sacramental rite of Confir¬ 
mation. When a man and woman, “soberly, 
discreetly, advisedly, and in the fear of 
God,” unite their lives in the holy estate of 
matrimony, it is more than a mere civil con¬ 
tract. It is a solemn commitment and 
pledge to mutual unselfish service by the 
grace of God. They twain become one flesh. 
When a man, moved by the Holy Spirit, 
honestly believing that he is called of God, 
makes the entire surrender of his life in or¬ 
der to be a minister of Christ and a steward 
of God's mysteries, it is the sacrament of 
Holy Order, fenced about and guarded with 
scrupulous care through all the Christian 
centuries —Noblesse oblige! 

So also when the soul, in penitence and 
remorse for sin, seeks some visible token and 
assurance of God's forgiveness, or when in 
its last agony the soul in awful solitude sees 


96 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


the windows of death wide open and is 
about to solve the mystery of the eternal 
and everlasting order, the Church is there 
with the message of the sacramental mean¬ 
ing and significance of our human life. 

The public worship of the Church is de¬ 
signed and ordered so as to keep before our 
minds and bring home to our hearts these 
exceeding precious promises of blessing and 
help. 

That worship is the assertion of our high 
birthright and privilege as children of God, 
coming into His Presence with loving con¬ 
fidence to do Him honor. It is the acknowl¬ 
edgment of the brotherhood and fellowship 
of all men in Christ, and the acceptance of 
the duty and service which that implies. It 
is finally the renewal of and re-assertion of 
our spiritual interpretation of life and the 
cleansing and strengthening of our souls 
through the redeeming power of the Spirit 
of Christ. And all these meanings of wor¬ 
ship center in and are set forth by the ser¬ 
vice of the Holy Communion, which is vari¬ 
ously called, in the ancient writings, “The 


THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 9 7 


Divine Liturgy,” “The Lord’s Supper,” and 
“The Holy Eucharist.” 

From the Apostles’ time until now, 
through all the centuries, this service has 
been the characteristic and distinctive act of 
worship of the Christian Church. Its very 
august and unique importance has made it 
a storm-center of controversy among men 
who have insisted on definitions; but with¬ 
out attempting to define how the Spirit 
effects the result, we know that IT is the 
perpetual and unfailing witness and re¬ 
minder of the continuing Presence of our 
Living and Ascended Lord. It is the au¬ 
thorized trysting place where we may meet 
Him in quiet hours, away from the struggle 
and strain of our daily tasks. It is the re¬ 
freshment of the soul, the assurance of His 
love, the gate of Heaven, the mysterium 
fidei, the mystery of faith. It is no wonder 
that about it and around it have gathered 
the finest expressions of man’s genius, in 
music and architecture and painting and 
sculpture; no wonder that the Church has 
exercised the utmost care in the appoint- 


98 


CHURCH, BIBLE, AND CREED 


ment of those who are authorized to admin¬ 
ister this sacrament. It is no wonder that 
the speaker feels his utter inability and un¬ 
worthiness to put into human language the 
beauty and the power of so great a mys¬ 
tery. Only the spirit of God can sound the 
depths of the things of God; and it is that 
Holy Spirit Who will open the eyes of our 
minds and quicken our understanding to see 
in all things bright and dark and glad and 
sorrowful the purposes of His unutterable 
compassion; Who will enable us to realize 
and show forth, in thought and act, the sac¬ 
ramental glory of our life; Who will bring 
the Christ to us in the sacrament and our¬ 
selves to Christ. For He is ours, and we are 
His, and “This is the victory that over- 
cometh the world, even our faith.” 

This has been beautifully expressed in 
Dr. Bright’s Eucharistic hymn: 

“And now, O Father, mindful of the love 
That bought us, once for all, on Calvary's Tree, 
And having with us Him that pleads above, 

We here present, we here spread forth to Thee 


THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 99 


That only Offering perfect in Thine eyes. 

The one true, pure, immortal Sacrifice. 

“Look, Father, look on His anointed face, 

And only look on us as found in Him; 

Look not on our misusings of Thy grace, 

Our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim; 

For lo! between our sins and their reward, 

We set the Passion of Thy Son our Lord. 

“And then for those, our dearest and our best, 

By this prevailing presence we appeal; 

O fold them closer to Thy mercy’s breast! 

O do Thine utmost for their souls’ true weal! 
From tainting mischief keep them white and clear, 
And crown Thy gifts with strength to persevere. 

“And so we come, O draw us to Thy feet, 

Most patient Saviour, Who canst love us still! 
And by this Food, so awful and so sweet, 

Deliver us from every touch of ill. 

In Thine own service make us glad and free, 

And grant us nevermore to part with Thee.” 



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